Future Risks Cloud the Issue of When to Take Social Security Benefits

For Americans approaching retirement age, an important decision is when to apply to the Social Security administration to start getting Social Security retirement benefits. A person can apply as early as age 62, and as late as age 70. The longer you wait, the larger your monthly check will be. For each year that you delay benefits, your monthly check will increase by roughly 7.5 percent. So a person with modest lifetime earnings might choose between getting 1000 dollars a month at age 62, 1335 a month at age 66, or 1783 a month at age 70. If you made more money during your working years, the monthly paycheck at each age might be larger.

Some experts tell us the decision about when to take benefits is simple. They offer the simple formula: delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now. If a person followed this advice, he would ask himself at age 62, “Do I need the Social Security money this year?” If the answer was negative, he would delay applying for benefits until the next year. And he would ask the same question when he was 63, 64, and so forth. He might delay filing for Social Security benefits until he was 70. Or, if he found that he needed the Social Security check at age 67, he might apply for benefits in that year.

But this “delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now” is an oversimplification. The decision on when to apply for Social Security benefits is actually a very complex one. As we will see, all of the following factors are relevant to your decision:

• Whether or not you need the Social Security check during any year between age 62 and 70.
• Your current heart rate
• What age your parents died at
• Whether you have a family history of cancer or heart disease
• Whether you are a smoker or obese
• Whether you are working after the age of 62
• How much money the US government currently owes
• Whether you think medical science will invent some anti-aging treatment you can afford
• How high US budget deficits will be in the coming years
• How high is the chance that the US government will cancel Social Security or trim its benefits

One tool to help make the decision about when to take Social Security benefits is what is called a break-even analysis. There are online tools that allow you to do this. For example, this site has a tool that asks your full retirement age, your Social Security benefit at age 62, your Social Security benefit at age 66, and your Social Security benefit at age 70. You can get these from your yearly Social Security statement. The site will give you a “break-even analysis” graph like the one below. 

 

What does the graph show you in this case? It shows you that there is a “break-even age” at about age 79. Theoretically, if you expect to live longer than this age, you will get more money from the government by delaying taking your Social Security benefits, rather than taking them at age 62.

So, clearly the simple slogan “delay applying for benefits as long as you don't need the money now” is an oversimplification. A better slogan might be “delay applying for benefits if you think you will live beyond the break-even age” (although I will discuss some reasons why even that slogan is on rather wobbly ground).

How would you tell whether you should expect to live beyond the break-even age? You might go to some actuarial tables, and find the expected life expectancy for a person of your age. The table here (on the Social Security Administration web site) will give you a rough idea.

But there are other things to consider. If you are a smoker or obese, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If you have a family history of heart disease or cancer, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If one of your parents died of natural causes before the age of 80, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on the table. If your resting heart rate is above 80 beats per minute, your life expectancy may be shorter than the number listed on a life expectancy table. But if you happen to think that some anti-aging treatment will be invented in the next two decades, and you think that you will be able to afford it, perhaps you will make a higher estimate of your life expectancy.

So matters have got quite complicated. Then there is a whole other can of worms to consider: whether the US government will in the future cancel Social Security or cut back on its benefits.

When giving financial advice on when to take Social Security benefits, almost every book and web site naively assumes that we can be confident that the US government will continue to pay benefits at the current rates, adjusted for inflation. For example, in her book How to Make Your Money Last: The Indispensable Retirement Guide, Jane Bryant Quinn gives us this cheerful assurance on page 72:

But benefits won't drop....Social Security keeps millions of older people out of poverty and saves millions of adult children from having to support mom and dad. No president, no Senate, no Congress will let those voters down.

But there is little basis for being so cheerful. The House of Representatives just passed a bill (approved by the President) that plans to make drastic cuts in health care. President Trump has released a budget that proposes sharp cuts in Social Security disability insurance payments. While the latter is not a cut in Social Security retirement payments, it is so “in the vicinity” that it should raise question marks about whether the government will be trimming Social Security retirement payments in the future. We should also consider that the United States national debt continues to spiral out of control, having reached nearly 20 trillion dollars after 16 years in which it doubled. The deeper the national debt, the more likely that the US government will trim future Social Security retirement benefits.

So whenever you see one of those break-even analysis charts, it might be better to visualize the chart like this. The question marks indicate the uncertainty that future payments will be made far into the future.

There are several ways in which the government could effectively cut Social Security benefits in a roundabout, sneaky way, without directly cutting anyone's paycheck. The government might suddenly raise the retirement age. Someone delaying benefits until he reached 66 might one day find this 66 had become 67 or 68; and someone delaying benefits until he reaches 70 might one day find that this 70 had become 71 or 72.

The government might also modify tax laws so that more of Social Security benefits are taxed. This might be done on either the federal or the state level. Or the government could introduce an assets test for Social Security benefits. So if you had a house worth $200,000 or more, you might find yourself no longer eligible to receive benefits.

Still another underhanded way for the government to shrink benefits would be for the federal government to be miserly in its cost-of-living adjustments, which are supposed to make Social Security payments keep up with inflation. The government already seems to be taking that route. Below are the miserly Social Security cost-of-living adjustments for the past 7 years. 

 

Another sneaky way for the government to reduce benefits would be to privatize Social Security benefits. If your future monthly Social Security checks were replaced by some stock fund that you owned, it would be hard to tell if the second was worth much less than the first.

There is also a very important question we must ask about conventional advice about when to take Social Security benefits. The question is: is such advice based on a faulty investment principle?

When people suggest that you should delay as long as possible before applying for Social Security benefits, they seem to be assuming this type of principle: maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money. Is that a good general principle for people of all ages? It may not be. Consider a person with $20,000 in savings. That person can maximize his chance of making the most amount of money by investing his money in stock options – a risky investment with a potential for very high returns. But stock options are so risky that the standard advice is: never invest in stock options if you need the money you are investing.

“Maximize your chance of making the most amount of money” may actually be a poor principle for an older person to follow. And it seems particularly dubious to recommend following this principle to someone so that he can get some extra monetary bonanza that will gradually accrue very late in life – in your eighties or nineties. By then you may be in such poor state of health that you won't be able to enjoy your extra money as much as you would if you were younger. For example, you probably won't be using your extra money to go on some tiring vacation when you are 85 or 90.

A better financial principle may be this: minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money. A person following this principle may come to a completely different decision about when to take Social Security benefits than if he were following the principle of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money.”

Let us consider an imaginary scenario of a man named Joe who has just turned 62 and has $150,000 in savings. He retires at age 62, and decides to delay taking his Social Security benefits until age 70, thinking to himself: “I'll get a bigger monthly check if I wait until 70 to file for benefits.” Joe spends his $150,000 covering his expenses over the next eight years. At age 70, he has run out of money; but he applies for Social Security benefits. A few months later, something horrible and unexpected happens: the Social Security program is canceled by a heartless administration. Joe is now left with nothing. He would have avoided this problem entirely if he had taken Social Security at 62. He could have used his Social Security payments to cover his expenses, and still be left with $150,000 at age 70.

If we imagine that Joe has one adult son at age 70, but no wife (who died earlier), and we imagine that Joe dies at age 70, it is a similar situation, except that things are bad for Joe's son rather than him. Instead of getting a $150,000 inheritance, Joe's son is left with nothing.

Joe might have suffered such a disaster if he greedily followed the “young man's principle” of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money.” But if Joe had more sensibly followed the principle of “minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money,” he would have avoided this disaster altogether, by taking his Social Security benefits when he was 62.

When some financial adviser advises you to wait to retire until 66, what is he really saying is that it will work out well financially for you if you work until 66 and then start taking Social Security benefits at that time. But such advice is not the same as a recommendation that you should wait to take Social Security benefits until age 66 if you stop working at age 62. If you have more than $80,000 in savings, it can make more sense to start taking Social Security benefits at age 62, because you will get a monthly check earlier and also you might be able to make a lot more in capital appreciation or interest from your savings than you would if you tapped those savings to fund your retirement between the age of 62 and 66. There may also be an additional tax benefit from taking Social Security benefits at age 62 if you have a spouse who is still working. This is because the Social Security benefits are taxed less than 401K withdrawals or non-Roth IRA withdrawals.

I am not a financial adviser, so I cannot make any recommendation on when you should take Social Security benefits. I will merely note that in light of the considerations discussed here, taking Social Security at the earliest possible age (particularly if you are single or if you have decided to stop working at age 62) may be wiser than is generally acknowledged. Be aware that a person advising you to wait until 70 to apply for Social Security benefits may be operating under some principle of “maximize your chance of getting the most amount of money,” which may be a good principle for adventurous young people, but may be an unwise principle for people in retirement or approaching retirement. The quite different principle of “minimize your chance of getting the least amount of money” may lead to a completely different decision on this matter.

Nerdy Postscript: Please ignore this postscript if you never use spreadsheets for personal finance decisions.

There is a way for you to make your own break-even analysis, one that may be more accurate than one done on an online calculator. You can set up a spreadsheet like the one shown below. This allows you to fine-tune the inputs (which in this case are the columns on the left). The simplest way to do the spreadsheet is to just type in the second column the numbers your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 62, to type in the third column the number your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 66, and to type in the fourth column the number your Social Security statement has given you for how much you will get if you retire at 70. You can use the Sum() function to create the columns on the right, which provide cumulative totals for the annual benefits listed on the left. 

 

The advantage of creating such a spreadsheet is that you can fine-tune the calculations, making them more realistic for your specific case. For example, in the top left corner you might create a formula which takes into account the fact that if you retire at 62 you may be earning additional income on money you have already saved, interest you would not be earning if you started taking Social Security benefits at age 66.

In your spreadsheet you can then create a graph of the last three columns. The graph will look like one of the break-even charts shown above. But it may give you a more realistic calculation, because you have fine-tuned the inputs.

Below is a spreadsheet graph created from the three columns at right. It graphs cumulative money received under three options: taking Social Security at age 62 (red), taking Social Security at age 66 (yellow), and taking Social Security benefits at age 70 (green), varying over a 28-year time span from age 62 to age 90, with the break-even age occurring at about age 81. This spreadsheet assumes the case of someone not working after age 62. 

 

If you print out such a graph, it would be a good idea to pencil in a bunch of question marks in the upper right corner of the graph. That will remind you that the longer you go into the future, the more doubtful are predictions about money you will receive from Social Security, because of the very substantial chance that benefits will be reduced in the future.

The Doctor Carved Up Their Explanatory Pretensions

When I go to the public library and select a book dealing with human origins, I often feel rather like someone in a Star Trek episode who might be transported inside one of those cubic spaceships of the Borg Collective, and who then might seek out a fresh, individualistic opinion from one of the inhabitants. It sometimes seems that the community of evolutionary biology professors is some kind of Borg Collective or hive mind, enforcing the same rubber-stamp thinking with robotic efficiency, with the same lack of individualism as a division of North Korean soldiers. So if you pick up a book on biological origins, you will expect that with high probability you will get the same old “just so stories,” the same old requirements underestimations, the same old exaggerations of the significance of peripheral or borderline evidence, the same old worshipful kneeling to Darwinian authority, the same old claims that the not-at-all-creative principle of natural selection is a magic wand that explains practically all of the wonders of biological innovation.

I was therefore quite surprised to find on my public library bookshelf the book Why Us? How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by physician James Le Fanu, who has written extensively in mainstream media and journals such as the British Medical Journal and the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Although he shows no religious motive, Le Fanu is very much a skeptic about the explanatory value of Darwinism. Le Fanu does not seem to doubt that life on Earth is very old, and he seems to favor the idea that humans have somehow evolved from other species. But he rejects the claim that Darwin's idea of natural selection can explain the origin of mankind or the more impressive cases of biological complexity.

On page 39 Le Fanu states, “The more one reflects on what is involved in standing upright or acquiring a large brain, the less convincing Darwin's proposed mechanism of natural selection appears to be.” He calls the reader's attention to the problem that while knuckle-walking like a gorilla (with four limbs) works well, and walking like a man works well, if there were to be evolution from four-limb walking to bipedal walking, it would require passing though an intermediate stage that wouldn't work well at all, with organisms being prone to topple over when they walked (and be devoured by predators). So the progression over many thousands or millions of years would be:

4-limb walking (works well) → Intermediate stage (works poorly) → Bipedal walking (works well)

The problem is that this progression is unbelievable under a theory of natural selection, which should stop any progression that works against survival value. The issue with the brain pointed out by Le Fanu is that to a creature in the wild, a much larger brain doesn't have much value, and has a negative value of making the birth delivery of a child much harder and more dangerous, due to the difficulty of passing a large brain though the narrow birth canal. Le Fanu states acidly on page 57, “It has taken just a few pages to draw out the contradictions, at every turn, in the prevailing scientific certainty of 'natural selection' as the driving force of the Ascent of Man.” 

On pages 92-95 Le Fanu discusses the evolution of the eye, eventually concluding on page 95 that “there is not a single empirical discovery in the past 150 years that has substantiated Darwin's proposal that natural selection, 'taking advantage of slight successive variations,' explains the 'puzzle of perfection' epitomised by so many different types of eye – which remain yet more puzzling than it was in 1859.” He would have made this point more powerfully if he had also pointed out the incredibly elaborate proteins and brain changes involved in vision.

Another doctor (Joseph A. Kuhn) does just such a thing in a scientific paper, noting the inadequacy of Darwinian explanations for the eye. He states:

However, biochemists have shown that even a simple light-sensitive spot requires a complex array of enzyme systems. When light strikes the retina, a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, which rearranges within picoseconds to trans-retinal. The change in the shape of the retinal molecule forces a change in the shape of the protein rhodopsin. The protein then changes to metarhodopsin II and sticks to another protein, called transducin. This process requires energy in the form of GTP, which binds to transducin. GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II then binds to a protein called phosphodiesterase, located on the cell wall. This affects the cGMP levels within the cell, leading to a signal that then goes to the brain. The recognition of this signal in the brain and subsequent interpretation involve numerous other proteins and enzymes and biochemical reactions within the brain cells. Thus, each of these enzymes and proteins must exist for the system to work properly...In summary, the eye is incredibly complex. Since it is unreasonable to expect self-formation of the enzymes in perfect proportion simultaneously, eye function represents a system that could not have arisen by gradual mutations.

After mentioning whale evolution, where the fossils seem to show dramatic evolution of structure moving way too fast to be accounted for by random mutations, Le Fanu states on page 120, “By 1980 the logical implications of such biological 'insolubilia' seemed inescapable: the central premise of Darwin's evolutionary theory of gradualist transformation was no longer tenable....Some other dramatic mechanism, as yet unknown to science, must account for the extraordinary diversity of life as revealed by the fossil record.”

On page 229 Le Fanu scolds scientists for their overconfident knowledge pretensions, and accuses them of “persuading us that we know so much more than we really do, or can.” On page 231 he states that the “proposed mechanism of natural selection as the 'cause' of the diversity of living things is contradicted at every turn by the empirical evidence of science itself.” Speaking of Darwinism on page 255, he says “As time has passed its anomalies and inconsistencies have proved ever more pressing, and now, with the crushing verdict of the genome projects, we are left to stare into the abyss of our ignorance of virtually every aspect of the complexities of the living world and its evolutionary history.”

Defenders of Darwinian orthodoxy are constantly trying to make it look as if everyone accepts Darwinism but the religiously motivated. A book like Le Fanu's helps to show otherwise, for he seems to have no religious motivation at all. While many claim that we must choose between Darwinism on one hand and creationism or intelligent design on the other hand, Le Fanu's book reminds us there is another major alternative: the simple alternative of saying, “We don't know the answer to this mystery.” You may refer to this position as origins agnosticism.

Why does someone like Le Fanu differ so strongly from the professors of evolutionary biology? Is it because he knows less about biology than such persons? Not at all; doctors know just as much about biology as biology professors, and probably more. I think the difference is that when you train to be a doctor, you do not undergo the years of social conditioning that our evolutionary biology professors are subjected to, in which they are placed in club-like “high peer pressure” social environments in which adherence to Darwinian dogma is constantly demanded. You can get to be a doctor without becoming a thought-robot of the hive mind or Borg Collective that is the community of evolutionary biology professors. Surveys indicate that skepticism about Darwinian orthodoxy is much higher among physicians than among professors, and the author of this scientific paper is another doctor doubtful about Darwinism.

A superb writer, Le Fanu is a critic of great insight, and his book is very thought-provoking. On page 108 of his book, he makes a comment that the modern scientist should print out and tape to his office wall: “The greatest obstacle to scientific progress, after all, is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.” True indeed – our scientific progress may be accelerated when overconfident scientists stop pretending to understand mysteries that they do not really understand, mysteries that may take mankind a thousand years to solve.

Postscript: There's an interesting new book called Cracking the Aging Code by theoretical biologist Josh Mittledorf PhD and Dorion Sagan.  The book is mainly on theories of aging. But on page 31 Mittledorf writes this:

I found that neo-Darwinism doesn't work very well as a description of real life. Several big things about life in general just don't add up in the context of neo-Darwinism: There's aging and death -- I'll try to show you in the coming chapters why I don't think you can account for the basic facts about aging within the framework of neo-Darwinism. But in addition, neo-Darwinism can't account for sexual reproduction or for the structure of the genome that seems actually "designed" to make evolution possible; neo-Darwinism also does not have a place for the recently established phenomena of epigenetic inheritance or horizontal gene transfer.  

On page 84 the authors state this: "Natural selection cannot be observed in the wild, because it requires huge areas and thousands of years." On the same page the authors state this: "But evolutionary biology today is a uniquely sick science, missing the vibrancy, the audacity, and the commitment to empirical truth that form the core of the scientific method."

When the Future Whispers to the Present

My previous post discussed experimental evidence suggesting precognition, which is defined as anomalous knowledge of the future not achieved through the normal senses. Experimental evidence gathered in laboratories is only part of the evidence for precognition. There is also episodic evidence from human experiences outside of the laboratory. Larry Dossey's book The Science of Premonitions is an excellent summary of such episodic evidence. Below are some of the very interesting accounts in that book. 
 

• A woman awoke at 2:30 AM, having had a nightmare that the chandelier above her baby's crib had fallen, crushing the child. In her dream she saw a clock with the numbers 4:35. She took the child out of the room with the chandelier, and brought the child to sleep with her. At 4:35 that morning, the chandelier did fall into the crib, exactly as in her dream.
• William Cox researched train accidents between 1950 and 1955, and found that in every case the number of people traveling on the trains was less than the number who rode similar trains that did not crash, suggesting a possible precognitive ability of humans.
• Quite a few people reported premonitions of the September 11, 2001 disaster before it happened. The four jet planes involved in the disaster had an average of only 21% of their seats filled, as if people had sensed something bad was going to happen.
• On May 3, 1812, John Williams had the same dream three times in a single night: a very specific dream about someone assassinating Spencer Perceval, the British Prime Minister. Eight days later Perceval was assassinated, and several of the details matched William's dream.
• A few days before he was assassinated, Abraham Lincoln had a dream that he would be assassinated.
• The famous writer Mark Twain had a dream about the death of his brother that turned out to closely match what happened a few days later.
• Several people had premonitions that something would go wrong on the Titanic before it sunk. One person who had a ticket on the ill-fated ship had two dreams that the ship would overturn, with passengers in the water.
• In 1950 a church blew up in Beatrice, Nebraska, at a time when the church normally would have had a choir practice. Amazingly, no one was hurt, because the church was empty. We can only guess at how many of these people felt a premonition of doom, and avoided their regular choir practice.
• According to research published in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, dozens of people had premonitions of disaster before the Aberfan avalanche that killed 144 people. Some had dreams about such a disaster before it happened.
• During World War II Winston Churchill had two premonitions that may have saved his life or those of others. One premonition led him to switch sides on his staff car. A bomb then went off near the side he moved away from. Another premonition led him to tell his kitchen staff to leave the kitchen and go underground. A bomb then destroyed the kitchen.
• As reported here, Lawrence Francis Boisseau had a dream that the World Trade Center was collapsing around him. Boisseau was killed in the attack.

On page 263 of the book Phenomena: The Secret History of the U.S. Government's Investigations Into Extrasensory Perception and Psychokinesis by journalist Annie Jacobsen, we have an astonishing case of apparent precognition. The book states:

Out of Langford's mouth came a prophecy. “A United States Pentagon official would be kidnapped by terrorists on the evening of 17 December 1981.”....Langford said he saw the terrorists breaking into the Pentagon official's apartment, binding and gagging the man, and then kidnapping him. Even more specifically, Langford saw this high-ranking official being shoved inside a trunk and secreted in the back of a van.

Sure enough, on December 17, 1981 exactly such a thing happened to Brigadier General James L. Dozier, who was kidnapped by a terrorist group called the Red Brigades. The van even had the same color mentioned by Langford.

I was not at all surprised to read about Boisseau's dream of the World Trade Center collapsing, for I had such a dream myself, several months before September 11, 2001. It was a very simple dream. In my dream, first I was standing inside the World Trade Center, and then the floor collapsed underneath my feet. In the dream I saw myself plunging as the whole building seemed to collapse. That day I told my wife that I had dreamed that the World Trade Center had collapsed. Several months later I was in the World Trade Center when a jet plane hit, but I was able to escape before the whole building collapsed. This is the only dream I have ever had about a building collapsing.

This is only one of many cases in which there was an uncanny match between something I dreamed and something that occurred. According to this wikipedia.org list, the most recent major earthquake in California was the Richter 6.0 quake of August 24, 2014, which caused over 300 million dollars of damage. About 4 hours before the earthquake, at about 2:00 AM I had a dream of a trash can mysteriously moving around on the floor, even though no one was touching it. I thought to myself: this might have been a dream of an earthquake tremor. Lying in my bed, I decided to send out a Tweet describing my dream – as soon as I woke up in the morning. When I woke up and checked the news, I saw it was too late – the earthquake had already occurred, a few hours after my dream.

The post here describes quite a few dreams I had that seemed to closely match reality, mostly events in the future or past events I had not yet learned about. The post here describes a case in which I had a dream of a meteor falling. There was an uncanny match between details of the dream and an event that happened a week later.

It has been quite a while since I had any dream experience closely matching reality. So I thought that I was all done with experiences suggesting precognition. But then this year something very astonishing happened.

I was eating dinner with my wife, watching the very entertaining and funny TV show The Carbonaro Effect. In this hidden camera reality TV show, magician Michael Carbonaro performs magic tricks in front of people who do not know that Michael is a magician and do not know that they are on TV.

I was watching the show in my living room, while my TV screen showed Carbonaro sitting with some other person at a table (I had not noticed they were in a room that was an office dining area). I went into my kitchen, where I could not see the show, and suddenly an idea popped into my head. It was an idea for something that would be very funny if it were done on The Carbonaro Effect show. My idea was that Michael Carbonaro could take a frozen fish and put it in a microwave oven, kind of saying, “I'm going to heat up my lunch now” in front of someone. Then when he opened the microwave door, there would be a live, moving fish about the same size as the fish he put in the microwave. I thought to myself: that would be very funny, to see something like that on this TV show.

I returned from my kitchen to the living room, to watch some more of the TV show. About 30 or 40 seconds later I saw Michael doing exactly what I had imagined. He took a frozen fish, and put it into the microwave. We saw the microwave oven apparently running, and then Michael appeared to take a live fish out of the microwave. He was saying something like, “Wow, I guess the fish came back to life,” or something to that effect. They might have done this trick by having a trick back door in the microwave, or maybe Michael had the live fish up his sleeve.

I had never seen the TV episode in question before, nor had I seen anything like it on any TV show. But my mind somehow managed to get the idea of exactly what was going to happen 30 or 40 seconds into the future – a totally weird and unpredictable type of thing. What are the odds of that happening by chance, maybe a million to one, or a billion to one?

I cannot say these things amount to ironclad proof that humans are able to sense the future in some paranormal way. I can merely give you some advice. If you ever have a strong premonition that disaster is about to strike, take that very seriously. So, for example, if you are about to board a bus, and you suddenly see in your mind a very vivid vision of the bus crashing, like in the Final Destination movies, with clear and distinct details, then take that seriously and go on some other bus. And if you have a flight scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, and you have a dream on Tuesday morning that your plane crashes, take that very seriously and change your travel plans.

Mainstream Media Continues to Misinform Us About ESP

The popular website Slate.com just published a long article about research into paranormal phenomena. The piece by Daniel Engber is an example of the unfair and misleading treatment this topic gets in the mainstream press.

The article is entitled “Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real” and is subtitled “Which Means Science Is Broken.” It's a kind of a “trojan horse” title, because the article was clearly written to try to debunk Bem's research. The article discusses experimental research by Cornell University emeritus professor Daryl Bem. The research was published in a peer-reviewed scientific publication, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The widely discussed paper was entitled, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.”

In Experiment 1 described in the paper, subjects sat in front of a computer screen that displayed two images of a screen. The 100 subjects were told behind one of the screen was an image, and behind the other screen was nothing. The subjects were asked to guess which screen had the image behind it, during a series of trials running 20 minutes. When an erotic picture was used as the image behind the screen, subjects were able to guess correctly somewhat more often which screen had the image behind it. With erotic pictures, they guessed correctly 53% of the time, much more than the 50% expected by chance. With pictures that were not erotic, the subjects got results very close to the result expected by chance, 49.8%. Other similar experiments reported in the paper also got more statistically significant results. 

 Schematic depiction of ESP

Skeptics were outraged by these results, claiming they would never be replicated. But they were replicated. The meta-analysis here discusses many successful replications of Bem's surprising results. The meta-analysis here ("Feeling the future: A meta-analysis of 90 experiments on the anomalous anticipation of random future events") discusses 90 experiments from 33 laboratories in 14 different countries. The analysis reported an overall effect of p=1.2 X 10^-10. Roughly speaking, this means the results had a probability of about 1 in 10 billion. This is a very impressive result, showing statistical significance millions of times stronger than what is shown in typical papers reported by mainstream media. A typical paper that gets covered by the press will have an effect of only about p=.01 or p=.05.

In his article at slate.com mainstream media writer Daniel Engber clearly attempts to disparage and belittle this research finding. He uses some common techniques used by those denying or belittling evidence for the paranormal.

The first technique is to deprive the reader of the most relevant information the reader needs to decide on this manner. Engber makes no mention of the extremely compelling effect of p=1.2 X 10^-10 reported in Bem's analysis. And so it almost always is when mainstream media reports on ESP experiments – typically a writer will report that a researcher reported “statistically significant” results without telling us that the degree of statistical significance reported is many times greater than what we find in typical scientific papers (which typically have statistical significance of only about p=0.5 or p=0.01).

The second technique Engber uses is a kind of isolation technique. His long article about ESP research gives no summary of the long history of ESP research dating back to the nineteenth century. The reader is almost kind of left with the impression that Daryl Bem's research was some weird fluke like a green sky appearing one day. But that's the opposite of the real situation. Scientists have been producing experiments showing very convincing evidence for ESP and other inexplicable human abilities for more than 100 years. The research started being done systematically about the time the Society for Psychical Research was founded in the late nineteenth century. One high point of the experimental research were the results of Joseph Rhine at Duke University during the 1930's, which actually produced results far more statistically significant than Bem's research. More recently, very compelling results for ESP were very often produced using a sensory deprivation technique called the ganzfeld technique. At the 2014 Parapsychological Assocation meeting, Diane Hennacy Powell MD presented extremely compelling evidence for ESP in an autistic child. Engber doesn't mention any of these things (see the table at the end of this post for the specifics).

Describing a moment in the past, perhaps about 1980, Engber tells us, very inaccurately, that “the laboratory evidence for ESP had begun to shrivel under careful scrutiny.” That is not at all correct. Classic ESP research such as Joseph Rhine's has never been successfully debunked. Before making this claim, Engber cites an example of what he apparently thinks is something that had discredited ESP research. It is the fact that James Randi hired associates to deceive some paranormal researchers, by acting as “fake psychics.” But while that incident reflected badly on Randi, it did nothing to discredit paranormal researchers, since they weren't the ones who were doing the faking.

Engber also throws in some “poisoning the well” rhetoric. He calls Bem's research results “crazy-land,” which is just vacuous disparagement. I may note that some of the most respected research results in scientific history (such as the double-slit experiments) were originally regarded as “crazy” results. Engber states:

Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions—that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you’d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong.

No, experimental results such as Bem's do not demand that we believe that “time can flow in two directions.” And it also is not true that results such as Bem's require people to believe that much of what they understood about the universe is wrong (although it is true that such research may suggest some people making overly dogmatic assumptions about the nature of time, consciousness and matter might need to reassess their assumptions, and admit their ignorance about such eternal questions).

Engber then goes to a long 8-paragraph discussion of a 2011 scientific paper by Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn. It's a paper entitled, “False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant.” Engber refers to this as the “When I'm Sixty Four” paper. Engber then delivers this very inaccurate statement:

But Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn revealed that Bem’s ESP paper was not a matter of poor judgment—or not merely that—but one of flawed mechanics....They’d shown that anyone could be a Daryl Bem, and any study could end up as a smoking pile of debris.

This statement by Engber is hogwash and baloney. In fact, the 2011 paper by Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn made no reference at all to Bem's research and made no reference to ESP or any research on paranormal phenomena. Their paper showed how someone might through dubious methods produce a borderline statistical significance along the lines of p=.05 or p= .01. But the paper did nothing to suggest that such dubious methods were used by Bem or any other ESP researcher. In fact, the level of significance claimed by Bem in his meta-analysis is p=1.2 X 10^-10. That's a level of significance a hundred million times greater than merely p= .01.

Engber has made a totally inaccurate claim that Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn debunked Bem's research, when their paper doesn't even mention Bem or ESP research. What he also fails to tell us is that if Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn's paper can be claimed to debunk anything, then it debunks all experimental research claiming results with a significance of around p= .01 or p=.05 – which is basically a large fraction of all research published in neuroscience, medicine, psychology, and physics. 

For Engber to claim some great significance for the paper of Simmons, Nelson, and Simonsohn is rather absurd, since the paper basically tells us that we can get false alarms when the results have a significance of around p= .01 or p=.05 – which is something everyone already knew before the paper was written.

Engber's next trick is to start talking about replication failures and research fraud. He says this:

A few months later came the revelation that a classic finding in the field of social priming had failed to replicate. Soon after that, it was revealed that the prominent social psychologist Diederik Stapel had engaged in rampant fraud. Further replication failures and new examples of research fraud continued to accumulate through the following year.

Clearly, Engber is trying to bring into his reader's mind the idea of ESP research being fraudulent. But, in fact, all of the examples cited above refer to work that was being done by researchers working on topics other than ESP or paranormal phenomena. Mentioning such things in the middle of an article on ESP research is not literally inaccurate, but it's extremely misleading, something very much prone to create a false idea in the reader's mind. In fact, ESP researchers have an excellent record of honesty, as good as that of any group of scientific experimenters. Engber does not cite any example of dishonesty by an ESP researcher – he simply deviously leaves his readers with an impression of such a thing.

I can imagine a writer writing in an equally misleading manner, giving some web links that do not actually refer to candidate John Doe, but to some other people. It might go like this:

Doubts have been raised about the candidacy of John Doe. There was a drunk driving arrest (Link 1). Then there was a bank robbery arrest (Link 2). Then there was a grand jury indictment (Link 3). Clearly we must question John Doe's fitness for office.

Of course, if none of these links referred to John Doe, but referred to other people, such a paragraph would be very misleading.

Towards the end of his piece, Engber tries to throw doubt on Bem's findings by referring to a replication attempt to repeat one of the several experiments in his original “Feeling the Future” paper. Engber claims that at the most recent meeting of the Parapsychological Association (which at this date would have been the 2016 meeting), Bem presented a “pre-registered analysis” which “showed no evidence at all for ESP.” Engber claims that nonetheless Bem's abstract of this work, after “adding in a new set of statistical tests,” stated that the replication attempt had produced “highly significant” evidence for ESP. Clearly Engber is trying to suggest that maybe some kind of statistical funny business was going on. But he presents no specific facts to back up such a claim, nor does he give a link that would allow us to check out his insinuations. When I go to the web page that lists the abstracts submitted to the 2016 meeting of the Parapsychological Association, I see no abstracts authored by Bem. The experiment referred to is not even the main experiment by Bem that received the most attention in the press (the experiment I described above). All in all, this does nothing to raise doubts about Bem, but may raise further questions about Engber's hatchet tactics when dealing with the paranormal.

In this case Bem is an ace Ivy League psychologist with several decades of statistical research experience, and Engber is neither a mathematician nor a scientist. So if Engber is going to raise doubts on statistical grounds, no one should pay attention to him unless he is very specific in what his precise objections are. A little vague rhetorical doubt-sprinkling does not suffice. In his long article, Engber does not actually provide a single specific well-documented statistical or methodological reason for doubting Bem's research.

Engber's misleading article is typical of the dismal coverage that ESP research gets in mainstream media. A great deal of this coverage is inaccurate. Astonishingly, it has become “politically correct” within today's science culture to make completely false statements about research into the paranormal. It is extremely common for scientists to claim there is no evidence for extrasensory perception, which is entirely false, given the very large body of convincing experimental evidence that has been gathered over more than 100 years, much of it under the auspices of major universities or the US government (see the table below for examples). It is also very common for scientists to say that the experimental evidence for ESP has been debunked or that it was never replicated. Neither of these statements is true. Shockingly, we have a science culture in which highly inaccurate statements on parapsychology research are pretty much the norm. It's rather like the situation we would have if it become popular in American history departments for professors to say that the Americans won the Vietnam War, and that they treated the Vietnamese very nicely while doing it.

Engber's article is entitled “Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real” and is subtitled “Which Means Science Is Broken.” A more accurate title for an article would be, “Joseph Rhine and Many Other Researchers Showed ESP Is Very Probably Real, But Science Culture Refused to Accept It, Which Shows Science Culture Is Broken.”

Bem's research was purely experimental. There is an entirely separate reason for thinking that humans can sometimes sense the future in a paranormal way: the large body of episodic accounts supporting such a claim. I will discuss this fascinating evidence in my next post. 

Below is a table showing some high points of research into ESP.

Researcher	Procedure	Results	Link
Professor Bernard F. Riess, Hunter College, 1937	Remote card guessing of 1850 cards with woman in another building	73% accuracy rate with expected accuracy rate of 20%	http://futureandcosmos.blogspot.com/2016/02/better-than-smoking-gun-riess-esp-test.html
Professor Joseph Rhine and others, Duke University, 1932	Card guessing experiments with Hubert Pearce, 10300 cards, experimenter and subject in same room	36% accuracy rate with expected accuracy of 20%	http://futureandcosmos.blogspot.com/2014/12/when-rhine-and-pearce-got-smoking-gun.html
J.G. Pratt,  Duke University, 1933-1934	Card guessing experiments with Hubert Pearce, 1850 cards, experimenter and subject in different rooms	30% accuracy rate with expected accuracy of 20%	http://psychicinvestigator.com/demo/ESPdoc.htm
Ganzfeld ESP tests, 1997-2008	ESP tests under sensory deprivation, various subjects, 1498 trials	32% accuracy rate, with expected accuracy of 25%	http://www.deanradin.com/FOC2014/Storm2010MetaFreeResp.pdf
Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, 2014	63 subjects, 570 trials, test of whether subject could correctly guess a phone caller	40% accuracy rate with expected accuracy of 25%	http://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/ISLIS_Vol32.pdf
Rupert Sheldrake, PhD, 2014	50 subjects, 552 trials, test of whether subject could correctly guess who sent an e-mail	43% accuracy rate with expected accuracy of 25%	http://www.sheldrake.org/files/pdfs/papers/ISLIS_Vol32.pdf
Diane Hennacy Powell MD, 2014,	ESP tests with an autistic child	100% accuracy on three out of twenty image descriptions containing up to nine letters each, 60 to 100% accuracy on all three of the five-letter nonsense words, and 100% accuracy on two random numbers: one eight digits and the other nine. Data from the second session with Therapist A includes 100% accuracy on six out of twelve equations with 15 to 19 digits each, 100% accuracy on seven out of 20 image descriptions containing up to six letters, and between 81 to 100% accuracy on sentences of between 18 and 35 letters. Data from the session with Therapist B showed 100% accuracy with five out of twenty random numbers up to six digits in length, and 100% accuracy with five out of twelve image descriptions containing up to six letters.	http://dianehennacypowell.com/evidence-telepathy-nonverbal-autistic-child/